RUSSIA TODAY
Wellbutrin: allegedly makes you “happy, horny, skinny”. Not what the FDA says. IMAGE/medconnections.com)
Pharmaceutical companies have been fined a record $11 billion over the past 3 years for unethical and illegal practices. But leading researchers says companies will carry on breaking the law, regarding fines as “the cost of doing business.”
Eight out of 10 of the biggest pharmaceutical producers in the world have been caught breaking the law in this period. All in all 26 healthcare companies have signed “corporate integrity agreements” with US authorities, a form of probation following serious fraud.
Their misdeeds are varied and cover dozens of best-selling drugs, but fall into several common types.
One is the attempt to hide dangerous side-effects of new, popular drugs. UK-based GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), is said to have purposely suppressed clinical studies and intimidated researchers who discovered that its pioneering diabetes drug, Avandia, significantly increased the risk of heart attacks. The company did not just quietly withdraw the drug as it discovered its side-effects, but continued to promote it.
Another offence has been off-label promotion – advising doctors to prescribe drugs for uses they were not approved for. Also made by GSK, Wellbutrin was sold by reps to doctors as a “happy, horny, skinny drug,” to be prescribed for anything from obesity to sexual dysfunction, while in fact it had only been approved for treating depression.
There are also instances of outright financial fraud. The world’s biggest pharmaceutical, Johnson & Johnson, paid tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks to Omnicare, a company that supplied drugs to nursing homes, so that it would prescribe a drug called Risperdal to its elderly patients with dementia. Incidentally, Risperdal hasn’t been licensed to treat dementia.
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